He’s the darkly attired guy you’ve seen at the grocery store, and the darkly attired guy you’ve seen playing in various actors’ bands on ABC’s “Nashville.” And he’s the darkly attired guy who you’re pretty sure you saw playing with Emmylou Harris, and also on that night when you stumbled into 3rd and Lindsley to hear a Canadian roots rock band called Blackie and the Rodeo Kings.

And wasn’t he a part of that “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” project? And didn’t you hear about him joining Bob Dylan’s band last year? Isn’t he a producer or something? Or a blues guy?

“Yes” to all of that. Linden never seems in a hurry, but he’s a dervish: Hardest-working Nashville-based Canadian in show business.

This week, he fronts Blackie and the Rodeo Kings on “Music City Roots” and — for the first time — on the “Grand Ole Opry,” and he and Rodeo Kings bandmates Tom Wilson and Stephen Fearing will play a Bluebird Cafe round, all in celebration of newly released album “South.”

And he’ll be working as a performance coach on “Nashville,” and probably doing some recording. (Much of the music heard on “Nashville” features Linden’s guitar.)

“It can be a little bit whirlwindy, but it’s really fun,” Linden says of his life in musical multitasking. “It’s going from something I love better than anything else to something I love just as much, and that’s really stimulating.”

In 42 years as a professional musician, Linden has played in most every imaginable scenario, from blues dives to concert halls and from threadbare studios to the world’s finest recording rooms. The top of all of it for him came in December, when he joined Dylan’s band for three weeks. Dylan’s modern shows are often criticized as ramshackle affairs, but Linden says the experience was transcendent.

“Best gig I’ve ever done,” he says. “I loved it. I think he’s the greatest artist of my lifetime. I never got to play with Louis Armstrong, and that’s the only thing that might have been comparable. It was quite amazing for me, but it also felt comfortable. Letting the songs reveal themselves as you play them, listening to the music and reacting to it, it was sort of like playing with some of the great, older blues artists. You have to be aware, and he hears every note of what’s going on up there: He’s really attuned to what’s going on.”

In love with his job

Then again, Linden takes a “best gig I’ve ever done” approach to each of his gigs.

He loves working with the actors on “Nashville,” enthusing about their passions for getting the music right. He loves playing solo gigs. He loves playing with Blackie in America, where the band is critically hailed, and in Canada, where Blackie is a major commercial force.

The group started in 1996 as a side project that recorded only songs written by Willie P. Bennett, but it has gone on to become an expansive combo that delivers fierce musicality and plenty in the way of original material. Recorded in Nashville, “South” is the band’s seventh album.

“We wanted to record here because Nashville kicks your (posterior) in a way that no place in the world does,” he says. “I get such a thrill doing a session here with Richard Bennett or Viktor Krauss or Marco Giovino or Buddy Miller. The bar is so high, and you learn so much being around that kind of vibe.”

Linden’s journey in music began before he was a teenager, when he met blues hero Howlin’ Wolf in a Toronto bar. He keeps the Wolf in mind when making music, taking care to consider whether he’s doing work that would please his forerunners.

“There are ways of measuring what you do that are maybe more accurate than sales,” he says. “Like, how good a time did you have? How good a time did the people who were there have? And the best we can do is to make the ancestors happy. I like to think about whether the Wolf or Muddy (Waters) would have felt good about it. That’s the spirit we’re trying to honor.”

LOS ANGELES — Phil Everly, who with his brother Don formed an influential harmony duo that touched the hearts and sparked the imaginations of rock ’n’ roll singers for decades, including the Beatles and Bob Dylan, died Friday. He was 74.

Everly died of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease at a Burbank hospital, said his son Jason Everly.

Phil and Don Everly helped draw the blueprint of rock ’n’ roll in the late 1950s and 1960s with a high harmony that captured the yearning and angst of a nation of teenage baby boomers looking for a way to express themselves beyond the simple platitudes of the pop music of the day.

Phil and Don Everly sing some of their hits in August 1997 at the 10th annual Everly Brothers Homecoming concert in Central City, Ky. Click to see more photos from the Des Moines Register. (Photo: Suzanne Feliciano / Associated Press)

The Beatles, early in their career, once referred to themselves as “the English Everly Brothers.”

The Everlys’ hit records included the then-titilating “Wake Up Little Susie” and the universally identifiable “Bye Bye Love,” each featuring their twined voices with lyrics that mirrored the fatalism of country music and a rocking backbeat that more upbeat pop. In all, their career spanned five decades, although they performed separately from 1973 to 1983. In their heyday between 1957 and 1962, they had 19 top 40 hits.

Don Everly was born in 1937 in Brownie, Ky., to Ike and Margaret Everly, who were folk and country music singers. Phil Everly was born to the couple on Jan. 19, 1939, in Chicago where the Everlys moved to from Brownie when Ike grew tired of working in the coal mines. The brothers began singing country music in 1945 on their family’s radio show in Shenandoah, Iowa.

Their career breakthrough came when they moved to Nashville in the mid-1950s and signed a recording contract with New York-based Cadence Records.

At long last, Dan Auerbach has set the record straight. He does not own a lock of Bob Dylan's hair - but if he wanted to get his hands on some, he knows a guy.

Dan Auerbach (photo: John Partipilo/The Tennessean

When it was reported last summer that Auerbach - who helms the Grammy-winning Nashville rock duo The Black Keys -and ex-wife Stephanie Gonis had finalized their divorce, news outlets honed in on one bizarre item Gonis would receive in the settlement: "Bob Dylan Hair."

This week, that blurb was still on the mind of one TMZ cameraman who tracked Auerbach down in an airport.

When asked if he really owned a lock of the rock legend's hair, Auerbach laughed it off. According to him, that asset was actually a famous poster of Dylan - an iconic silhouette in which his hair is colored in a psychedelic swirl.

Auerbach told TMZ that after the divorce reports, he'd heard from "Bob Dylan's son" - presumably Jakob Dylan of The Wallflowers, who recently recorded at Auerbach's Easy Eye studio in Nashville.

"He texted me and said, 'If you really need a lock of his hair, I can probably get it for you.'"

Asked what he'd pay for something like that, Auerbach replied: "I'd get it for free, man."

Click the photo above for a photo gallery from the making of the 'CMT Crossroads.' Here, Patrick Stump of the Fall Out Boy and Kimberly Perry of The Band Perry talk over their parts as they rehearse a song on Oct. 1, 2013, in Nashville. (Photo: Larry McCormack/The Tennessean)

Stump, lead singer for rock group Fall Out Boy, was baffled — even with the help of a teleprompter — the first time his group and Perry’s sibling trio attempted the soaring ballad in rehearsal. While Kimberly Perry nailed the lyrics to her trio’s song, Stump didn’t even attempt the lines assigned to him and asked to go through the song with just Kimberly Perry and a guitar.

“There were a lot of rhythms that just came in sideways in my head,” Stump said of “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely.” “By the end of it, that will probably end up being my favorite song because that was the one we spent the most time on.”

The unexpected collaboration between The Band Perry and Fall Out Boy and the initial confoundedness with “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely” is par for the course for CMT’s long-running cross-genre duet series, “Crossroads.”

While members of both bands struggled at times during rehearsals, they managed to learn each other’s songs enough to confidently perform them together during the next day’s live taping of “Crossroads.”

“It’s interesting because there’s all this angst going (into the taping) about who is going to do what,” said John Hamlin, executive producer on “Crossroads” and senior vice president of music events and talent at CMT. “When ultimately the musicians step onto the stage for the first rehearsal, they instantly speak a language that the rest of us don’t speak and they work it out between themselves. They are always very gracious and very generous and very inclusive.”

Steve Earle talks with students in Alice Randall and David Ewing’s dorm room at Vanderbilt on a recent Sunday. (Tony Gonzalez / The Tennessean)

By Tony Gonzalez
The Tennessean

As a singer, songwriter and political activist, Steve Earle doesn’t pull his punches. And he’s not afraid to disagree, even with a friend.

So when he stood in front of a group of about 40 students inside a Vanderbilt University dormitory on a recent Sunday as longtime friend, author and songwriter Alice Randall introduced him as the “greatest living songwriter who is still writing in America,” he just had to interject.

Randall had just placed Bob Dylan out of the running for a lack of recent output.

Bob Dylan performs at the AmericanaramA Festival of Music on the Lawn at Riverfront Park on Sunday evening, June 30, 2013, in Nashville. Click on image for more photos. (photo: Samuel M. Simpkins / The Tennessean)

The venue was a nondescript area just south of the Shelby Avenue pedestrian bridge. The sound was superb if you fought your way up front and stood for more than five hours. The sound was lacking in power and immediacy if you spread a blanket out on the hill that leads to the Korean Veterans Bridge.

Bob Dylan performs during the AmericanaramA Festival of Music Sunday night at the Lawn at Riverfront Park. Click image for more photos. (photo: Samuel M. Simpkins / The Tennessean)

Sunday night, Bob Dylan stood and sang in front of a cityscape that has stretched upwards and outwards in the 44 years since he championed it on his country-inflected “Nashville Skyline” album.

A Rock and Roll Hall of Famer who transformed the language of popular song, Dylan headlined the multi-act whirl billed as the AmericanaramA Festival of Music. Audience members stood on the dusty, grassy Lawn at Riverfront Park, just south of the pedestrian bridge spanning the Cumberland, for a show that featured Dylan, Wilco, My Morning Jacket and Dylan’s fellow Rock Hall of Famer, The Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir.

Weir opened the concert, playing a late afternoon solo/acoustic show and appearing healthy and committed only two months after he collapsed during a concert in upstate New York. Ticket-holders — many of whom braved an entrance line that spanned several city blocks — were still streaming in during Weir’s set and when Weir guested during My Morning Jacket’s sprawling, exploratory roots-rock turn. But most everyone was in place by the time Weir reappeared again, during Wilco’s performance to aid a collaborative version of the Dead’s “Bird Song.”

AmericanaramA provided an unofficial kickoff of a Fourth of July week that will feature fireworks and music: The Band Perry, Keb’ Mo’, the Nashville Symphony and others will perform downtown on Thursday.

Dylan moved playfully and mischievously around the stage during his set, which offered reinvented versions of his classic songs, backed by an explosive band that includes Nashville guitarist Stu Kimball and multi-instrumentalist Don Herron. In the early 1990s, Herron and his bandmates in BR549 drew thousands of music fans to Lower Broadway club Robert’s Western World, helping spark a Lower Broad revitalization that opened the way for events like AmericanaramA, and for the building of structures that make today’s Nashville skyline more impressive and involved than the one that drew Dylan’s attention so many years ago.

Jack White performs at the Masonic Temple's Scottish Rite Cathedral on Thursday, May 24, 2012 in Detroit, Mich. White played an 80-minute set in his first show here under a solo banner. He was joined by a five-piece band. He is also scheduled to play this evening. (JARRAD HENDERSON/Detroit Free Press)

The anonymous benefactor who recently paid the entire $142,000 balance in taxes to prevent Detroit’s Masonic Temple from falling into foreclosure was revealed Tuesday to be musician Jack White, who played there as a solo artist and with his former band, the White Stripes.

The Detroit-born White also partly grew up at the Masonic when his mother served as an usher there.

In light of White’s gift, the Masonic Temple Association said it would rename the temple’s Cathedral Theater — sometimes known as the Scottish Rite — as the Jack White Theater.

“Jack’s donation could not have come at a better time and we are eternally grateful to him for it,” said Detroit Masonic Temple Association President Roger Sobran. “Jack’s magnanimous generosity and unflinching loyalty to this historic building and his Detroit roots is appreciated beyond words.”

Ben Blackwell — White’s nephew who is the White Stripes’ official archivist and an employee at the Whites’ Third Man Records label — explained some of the thinking behind Jack White’s motivation. The White Stripes played their first public show, an opening gig for the Hentchmen in 1997, at the Gold Dollar, a now-defunct Cass Corridor club just down the street from the Masonic.

About six years later, the band was at the height of its acclaim, playing two sold-out shows at the Masonic, one in the smaller Scottish Rite, the other at the venue’s main theater.

“What really puts it all in context were those first two White Stripes performances in April 2003 — two consecutive nights, one in the small room, the other in the big room,” said Blackwell. “From the loading docks you could see the Gold Dollar. It took years, four albums and how ever many of tour miles to go that very significant half a block.”

In addition to White’s personal history there — White’s mother as an usher, seven White Stripes shows, two solo performances — Blackwell cited the Masonic’s past rock glories, including hosting shows by the MC5, the legendary provocative Detroit band that the White Stripes would one day cover.

“That’s why a venue like this should keep on going. It’s all connected,” Blackwell said.

The Jack White Theater is a 27,878-square-foot venue that can seat 1,586 people.

“We could not be more humbled to bestow this honor on Jack,” Sobran said.

Now 37, White is a singer-songwriter, record producer and actor best known as the vocalist, guitarist and pianist of the White Stripes until the band split in 2011. He has collaborated with many major musicians, including the Rolling Stones, Alicia Keys and Bob Dylan.

Meanwhile, a lodge or individual who wishes to make a donation to the temple can visit the Detroit Masonic Temple website at www.themasonic.com and click on the “Support the Temple” tab on the far left side of the homepage.

Richie Havens, the folk singer and guitarist who was the first performer at Woodstock, died Monday at age 72. (File / Associated Press)

NEW YORK — Richie Havens, the folk singer and guitarist who was the first performer at Woodstock, died Monday at age 72. Havens died of a heart attack in New Jersey, his family said in a statement. He was born in Brooklyn.

Havens was known for his crafty guitar work and cover songs, including his well-received cover of Bob Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman.”

His performance at the three-day 1969 Woodstock Festival, where headliners included Jimi Hendrix, was a turning point in his career. He was the first act to hit the stage, performing for nearly three hours. His performance of “Freedom,” based from the spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” became an anthem.

Havens returned to the site during Woodstock’s 40th anniversary in 2009.

Havens, who released his debut, “Mixed Bag,” in 1967, released more than 25 albums. He sang with doo-wop groups on the street corner in his Brooklyn neighborhood at an early age. At 20, he moved to Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, where he performed poetry, listened to folk music and learned how to play the guitar.